I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, August 11th.

In 2018, at the New York State Democratic Convention, Governor Andrew Cuomo said this.

Sexual harassment of women is real. It is undeniable.

And this is the moment in history to make the reform and end it and end it once and for all.

And New York is going to be the state to do it. It ends here,

and it ends now. Cringeworthy now, maybe, right? But was he being prescient? Is his resignation a sign

that Me Too has staying power? To talk about Me Too, Andrew Cuomo, women and power, we're going to put

this story into national, maybe even global context. Let's hear from Rebecca Traster, writer at

large for New York Magazine, and author of the book, Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power

of Women's Anger. Hi, Rebecca. Welcome back.

Hi, Brian.

It's good to be here.

So your focus on Governor Cuomo has been on power and how he uses it,

how what you call the theatrics of dominance,

theatrics of dominance, kept him in power.

Can you describe what you mean by theatrics of dominance? Yeah,

there's a thing that Andrew Cuomo is great at, and it is performing authority, right? And we can

think of the sort of ways he's done it well, right? Performing competence, like in the news conferences

through COVID that won him and Emmy, you know,

and that people loved and felt comforted by. He would get up there and he would perform confidence

and he was in control and that's sort of the prettiest version of this, right? It was comforting to a lot of people. Now, what we later learn, and the reason

that I emphasize the word performance there is that, in fact, the state was in many ways mismanaging

...